This week's poll was suggested by Nyxsha. If the original source material was R19, is it okay for an adaptation to be R15? Would action movies be better if they could show blood?

You can submit poll ideas here: https://www.mangaupdates.com/topic/kilkdnn/site-manga-poll-suggestions

Previous Poll Results:

Question: Would you give a bad rating to a good series just because you didn't like the ending?

Choices:

• Yes, endings matter a lot - votes: 618 (24.5%)
• Maybe, depends on how much I liked the rest of the series - votes: 1442 (57.1%)
• No, I would give a fair rating even if I disagree with the ending - votes: 466 (18.4%)

There were 2526 total votes. The poll ended: March 22, 2025

Gotta stick that landing. Looking at you, Game of Thrones

A just ruler amongst tyrants

Blood is black in manga. I don't really see the difference here.

Quote from YuriM

Blood is black in manga. I don't really see the difference here. Think about webtoons which has R19 novel which has lot of smut xD as R15 often it's out of place as for example specific r19 scene was used as reference later, while in R15 they need to skip whole part of story or change it xd

Yes Sometimes it doesn't make much of a difference, and sometimes it does. As long as the genre feeling/vibe doesn't change, I could care less. Like there is just a lot of stories/media that place smut/violence in the beginning of the story and it doesn't carry forward to the rest of it.

For example, not manga, but the television show The Expanse starts with a torture scene that just is very unappealing to some of my scifi friends. The rest of the show has minimal violence and is mostly talking. This made it really hard for them to trust how great the show would be.

From an adaptation standpoint, the new creative team can look at what really happens and how often it does, and then maybe lower the rating to allow more people to read/watch it.

Internet Lurker At Heart

Hmmm.... I'm on the fence about this. I think it can be done, but in some cases it shouldn't be. The key is to uphold the storyline. Imagine Blade of the Immortal without all the blood. It would totally change the story and overall vibe. In a lot of stories explicit sex can be skipped. However, if it is too PG then it loses a sense of passion. It definitely shouldn't be done for everything.

In general, yes, I think it's okay to adapt an adult comic into something more appropriate for younger audiences. As others have said, as long as the main idea of the story is still intact. Sometimes great stories can be overshadowed by excessive violence or sex which can turn people away.

Quote from kurotaito

Yes Sometimes it doesn't make much of a difference, and sometimes it does. As long as the genre feeling/vibe doesn't change, I could care less. Like there is just a lot of stories/media that place smut/violence in the beginning of the story and it doesn't carry forward to the rest of it.

For example, not manga, but the television show The Expanse starts with a torture scene that just is very unappealing to some of my scifi friends. The rest of the show has minimal violence and is mostly talking. This made it really hard for them to trust how great the show would be.

From an adaptation standpoint, the new creative team can look at what really happens and how often it does, and then maybe lower the rating to allow more people to read/watch it.

For rofan web novels it's always for worse as smut is often part of plot xd not extras

I voted yes, but it just really depends on how graphic the original story was, what's being cut, and how they choose to adapt it to preserve the narrative and the flow of the story.

A lot of R15 rofan manhwas are based off of R19 novels, and while I often see people bemoaning that because they want snusnu, as someone who's not really a fan of smut, I prefer it this way as long as the original novel was a story with smut and not just smut with a story.

When the latter gets turned into a R15 comic it tends to have a lot of plot holes and gaps and stupid smut logic that doesn't even lead to smut, just leads to implied stuff or nothing at all for no apparent reason, which isn't really super fun to read, so if all it is is porn with plot, it should just be adapted as R19 to begin with or not at all.

There are also cases where the sex scenes have important narrative elements that can't be conveyed easily by other means or if there's graphic violence or mature themes to the story that would negatively impact the story if they were left out. I don't think the actual story should be completely gutted and made into a hollow, weak version of itself just to lower the age rating.

However, if it's an actual proper story that isn't centered around sex, not just smut held together with the faintest hint of narrative structure, the sex scenes can most of the time either be cut entirely or censored by not showing anything directly explicit and only keeping the important parts or by fading to black at the right times.

A story shouldn't be gratuitously censored to the point where scenes lose their impact, stakes, or narrative weight, but honestly a lot of sex scenes are just them banging for the sake of watching people bang, and their inclusion doesn't add much to the story.

Depths of Malice is a fantastic revenge story with an amoral protagonist, and while I think it makes sense for it to be R19 in order to really do justice to the story (and to the absolute menace of a FL), most (if not all) of the actual sex scenes feel super unnecessary and/or excessively drawn out and are honestly the weakest part of the story. It's like yeah okay hurry up and finish banging the ML already so you can go back to ruthlessly ruining people's lives for slighting you.

It also starts off misleadingly smutty-seeming in the first couple of chapters before doing a sudden change into a revenge narrative with relatively little smut until she gets together with the ML later on in the story, so I think it would genuinely benefit in that respect from a little bit of censoring since it can scare people away. It's definitely something worth reading in spite of the smut, not because of it.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that it depends on how explicit the original novel is and how important those explicit scenes are to the narrative, but there are a good number of stories that imo are improved by being pared down into a R15 comic adaptation (or at the very least have some of the sex scenes faded to black or abbreviated) because you get to enjoy the real meat of the story instead of wasting your time on largely narratively irrelevant extended sex scenes.

No opinion here... I personally will always try to find the original. But having R15 adaptation often helps to know that series exists, then i see remark that it is adaptation and know to search for original.

I am envoy from nowhere in nowhere. Nobody and nothing have sent me. And though it is impossible I exist. © Trimutius

R-rated movies always got children and teen-rated games in the 80s and 90s. Marketing them to kids was frankly the norm and Joe Camel taught an entire generation the health benefits of smoking. (One Piece arguably still does that despise airing during a Sentai kid´s block.) Conan, Highlander, Robocop and many received cartoons. Aliens nearly got one too. The Witcher almost got a kid´s cartoon by Netflix recently but that endeavor seems abandoned.

Batman got tons of R/M/TV-Ma-rated media but also Y-7-rated media and all-ages comics without any issues or drops in quality. A version of The Little Endless Storybook for Berserk sounds fun if you ask me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Endless_Storybook

TV edits always sucked but spin-offs for other age groups make sense if done right. But if we are talking about Pornhwa getting PG cuts, R19 and 15 are the terms here, then fuck off I say. James Gunn's PG Porn: The Comic has no right to exist.

I also read EU/US comics and am a librarian.
Manga-Masters, My ANN-Lists + Imdb

Yes, as long as the quality is good, I see no reason why not mmm...

The prime example of this is probably Visual Novel mmm...

A lot of R18 VN like Fate Stay Night just work really well into more family friendly rating because the base story is already pretty good mmm...

I will change this world mmm...
So the world can change me mmm...

Isn't the answer already in the question?

If you want to change the rating of the story to have a different audience, then you have to adapt it.

Now, I don't think trying to reach a different audience is problematic, if the regulations are followed as they should.

So why wouldn't it be okay to adapt an original R19 into an R15? If the R15 is approved for publication, what's the problem then? It just comes down to how well you can make it, but that's not a moral problem, it's a skill problem and not relevant to the question.

MmMmMmhhhHhhHhh...

As many here have said (but in other words), it's more about the "why" than anything else.

Is it about sharing an IP you enjoy but in a format that's easier to access with content and stories that are best explored in a story aimed at a younger demographic? Then go ahead. Batman the Animated Series and all the associated Bruce Tim cartoons are masterpieces and arguably the best superhero stories to ever reach a moving picture.

Are you trying to introduce people too young to concepts and content they shouldn't be approaching just yet? Hell no!

As residentgrigo aptly put it: "James Gunn's PG Porn: The Comic has no right to exist."

I agree 100% with that statement. Not only does it water down whatever the original audience wanted, it's also full of themes and "atmosphere" that are harmful to younger minds.

And don't get me started on all the manga that will draw 1-5 panels with detailed nudity (out of 30 plus chapters) only for the rest to be a plot from a Shonen Jump "there is only friendship here" story. That's literally the opposite of what I want. Drop the nudity and add the romance. But I digress.

I'm a jack of all trades but master of none. Too many jars and not enough hands.

I put "no opinion" but like the previous question my real answer is "it depends".

There are certainly series where the themes are so fundamentally adult that it doesn't make any sense to kiddify the source material for general consumption. Berserk for instance, I... don't understand how the 2016 anime was literally ever greenlit.

But there are also series where there's egregious gore or nudity because that's just what the author is into where there's no particularly child-inappropriate nature to the fundamental themes of the series, like Killing Bites (the most mature theme in that manga is literally a young teenager learning to cope with death, which would be SUPER appropriate for an R15 anime), censoring it a bit to make it a daytime TV anime doesn't take away from its essence imo. Though I hear the anime sucked anyway lol

I will say that Japan's R-15 rating is closer to a 19+ in Korea and a R in America, so I think it would really depend on the rating criteria. Though adapting a hentai and trying to tone it down for general audience is definitely not a good idea, with the exception of eroge since a lot of them aren't all that sex focused to begin with, and so much so that they get rereleases with the explicit scenes getting cut out.